


Compromised Agency

by izumi2



Series: List of Questions (Civil War Team Iron Man) [7]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (the tag is just in case), But more like Confused Steve Rogers, Civil War Team Iron Man, Not Wanda Friendly, Not exactly Steve Rogers Friendly, Sam Wilson sheds some light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 17:07:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13462695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/izumi2/pseuds/izumi2
Summary: The Avengers have encountered and being subjected to mind control but the consequences for the involved were very different.~*~#Team Iron ManPS-All my fics are now moderated due to influx of trolls...





	Compromised Agency

**Author's Note:**

> Wow! I'm on a binge!! Two one-shots in less than a week!

**_ Why is Wanda different from Hydra and Loki? _ **

“I don’t understand!”

Sam sighed at Steve’s outburst, “What now?”

“Look, I understand that Tony is also victim, I can see that now. But people are crucifying Wanda for something she had no control. It wasn’t like Loki who dictated someone’s actions almost to the detail but people are even angrier at Wanda than they are at Loki even with the level of…control not being anywhere near the same, this is what I can’t understand.”

The former airman looked around them. The common room of the European Enhanced Prison is exactly the same as the American, Canadian, Asian and African ones, might as well since why sacrifice its innumerous safety measures for the sake of aesthetics? So it also has a dozen or so TV monitors that an inmate could ask JOCASTA to change for them. All in all, they were much nicer than the usual American jail. Sam also knew why the subject was brought up: the screen closest to them was showing the final court day of Wanda’s.

The lawyer did the best he could. Court appointed, nervous and clearly very new at this, the young man was just too shy to properly coach Wanda not to speak out of turn. It was easy to be afraid of her, after all.

The judges already decided on a sentence for the theoretically ‘bigger’ crimes of her involvement with HYDRA and Johannesburg when her intentions were clearly malicious and even Lagos where it was an accident which the majority of the onus was put on Steve and Natasha anyway as the experienced ones that decided she was field-ready, Leipzig didn’t help the situation at all but considering the ignorance of pretty much everybody involved on Steve’s side, she was only sentenced for the property damages and her part in Rhodes' injury.

 Now they reached her newly revealed part in the Ultron business and it was clear that while the ones judging her part on it were a little confused on how to proceed – understandably since they can deal with physical torture or mental manipulation, coercion, blackmail or plain fear but when someone’s powers is literally get inside someone’s head then it’s a little unprecedented – the people watching were reacting a lot more violently than they did with Loki.

“Which part are you saying that she had no control?”

“You know how her powers work. They are not…meticulous on the… plans. She can pull or push down feelings so strongly that we basically hallucinate and then we produce images and sounds based on whatever she heightened. Wanda didn’t put the idea of Ultron on Tony’s head, she mentally compromised him on getting back to that but she didn’t put the idea on his head.”

“Let’s remember that the original plans also didn’t include the Mind Stone, Steve.” Sam reminded him but Steve shook his head.

“I’m not talking about that. I understand why Tony was never put in court for Ultron. Alien tech, the usual security measures were not sufficient and he never deviated from what he usually does. I know that Wanda made him revisit the project and it didn’t turn out the way he hoped because not even Thor knew that there was something maliciously sentient inside the Gem itself that doesn’t come from the user. But Loki commanded almost everything Selvig and Clint did to the letter but there wasn’t nearly as many…death threats to him while Wanda didn’t even know about Ultron at all.”

And Sam finally set aside his apathy for some deep thinking. Outside his therapy sessions, the former airman hasn’t made much effort of his own, mainly because he had no idea when his old and worn star struck tendencies towards Steve would or could emerge.

“I think,” he started with caution, “that part of it is that Loki didn’t hide what he did. I mean, there was news coverage and even dozens of testimonies about what he did in Stuttgart and then his little show in New York, even in New Mexico, the ones that covered that one up were SHIELD… Wanda knew her part in Ultron and decided that no one needed to know while the world ripped Tony apart.”

Steve winced at that and Sam knew he was thinking that Wanda wasn’t the only one to hid deeply personal and criminal information. Perhaps a little unfairly, but Sam couldn’t help the stray thought that even with the ‘volunteering for a German scientist to experiment on them to protect their country’ proving to be false, then Steve had other traits in common with Maximoff.

“I guess,” Steve frowned a little, “the other day, some commenter… journalist? Was saying that news of corruption and lies didn’t surprise anyone anymore.”

And Sam got where he was trying to get but, “It’s not the same. They were probably talking about politicians or big corporations that cut corners and screwed people over. This is someone that, aside from Tony and Banner, was supported by the entire roster of Avengers to become one although not knowing about Ultron, you guys knew her part in Johannesburg. People understand why Tony and Banner didn’t volunteer the information about South Africa: their credit wasn’t exactly all that high right after Ultron, Hill works for Stark and Helen Cho was so terrified she quit a job that was her dream just to get away from Wanda and who would hear them anyway without proof and with the rest of the Avengers supporting her membership?”

Steve was silent for a moment before sighing and nodding, “You said that this was only part of it?”

“The other part is because of the differences in mind control techniques.” Sam sat up straighter, this would begin to wander through guess work but he had a pretty clear view as a third party that never was mind controlled, “If we were to put this in a scale of suggestion, I think we can agree that Wanda is the least aggressive. She doesn’t put new things in your head, she intensifies certain feelings so much that you literally hallucinate,” Sam waited until Steve nodded to get to the next one, “then we have Loki. He needed Selvig to build the device to use the Tesseract, so he needed Selvig’s knowledge, meaning that Loki himself didn’t know how to build the thing and that breach is what allowed Selvig to put that failsafe and Clint not to shoot Fury in the head. Loki had a plan but the means were up in the air, right?” once again Steve nodded and Sam knew that the next part was a little delicate but he was the one that asked Sam, “And then we have Hydra and Barnes. Hydra used a combination of neuro-implants in his brain and torture, physical and mental and even biological manipulation that aside from brief flashes of confusion he truly had no control over his actions and mission directives.” Sam managed not to roll his eyes at the vehemence in Steve’s nod right then but then he stopped and turned completely white, almost grey.

“They already judged Buck not guilty! They can’t change that!” he almost yelled and a few of the others inmates turned in their direction, Sam harshly hushed him, “Sorry, but –”

“They are not! The lawyer the UN got for Barnes is clearly better than the one the court got for Wanda. He pushed Barnes’ case first. Even I know that if Wanda was judged before, then mind control was inevitably going to come up and Barnes would be very much screwed.” This calmed Steve somewhat and this time Wilson didn’t bother suppressing the eye roll.

“Ok, but you said that technically the aggressiveness in method changed things.” His breathing returning to normal, Steve could acknowledge that he overreacted. If the more aggressive the method, the least culpability, of course Bucky couldn’t be faulted for the deaths Hydra ordered, “Shouldn’t that work for whoever controlled them too? With Hydra being the most guilty and Wanda the least?”

“Like I said: it doesn’t help that Wanda hid her part in it. The problem is that this can’t be put on a scale. The more aggressive the method, the least culpability the one controlled has but that doesn’t work the same way on the culpability of the one that was exercising the control. All three were malicious in their intentions and because the kinds of agency they allowed their victims are different and the results are different, then the culpability is also different.”

Rogers shook his head in confusion, “Let’s play this out because I don’t know if I am getting what you mean.”

“Ok. For example Barnes. What happed with the Starks is not much different from what happened in Berlin, right? In the two occasions, someone used his trigger words and gave him orders. According to his testimony, sometimes his handler would give very specific and very fine details for him to carry out during the hits and sometimes the handler would be like Loki and give him an objective and how Barnes accomplished it would be up to him, right?”

“But no matter what, he would be incapable of defying them.” Sam pursed his lips but nodded.

“So Barnes’ level of agency would be non-existing. Hydra trained him in combat, infiltration, armed and disarmed combat and whatever else, so even in the case that the handler just gave him an end goal, the ways he could accomplish the mission would be limited to what he knew from his couple of years in the army and seven decades in Hydra, right?”

“Meaning that even then Hydra would have some idea about how he would fulfill the orders given.”

“Correct. So in that way, those occasions can be compared to what Loki did with Selvig and Clint. He gave them an ending goal and they went about it their way. However, unlike the situation with Barnes and Hydra, Loki was in the dark about the methods they would be using, hence: leeway and loopholes. Is it fair? No, but because of it there is less to accuse Loki of. His puppets did less damage. They managed to fight it some. Even Barnes manage to shake off a little of it, probably because of the same reason, Hydra gave him an end goal but not the details and then you came along and confused him enough.”

“Then the same should apply to Wanda too. She wanted to destroy Tony, to torture him but how he went about it was on him.” Steve stopped once he saw Sam shaking his head.

“You manage to convince Barnes that something was wrong, just enough for him to fight and for memories to resurface, for enough humanity to enter his skull and make him realize that he is not some literal Hydra killing machine, that he had a life and other morals before all that, not to mention a personality. Clint and Selvig were perfectly aware of what they did because they were mind controlled and what they did because it was them fighting it. They knew that if it wasn’t for Loki’s scepter, they would never do what they did. Help the guy further his goal of planet domination.

But Tony and Wanda? The reason people are so much more terrified and consequently angrier at Wanda is because not even Tony himself knew that he got compromised at all. He didn’t know that there was something to fight in the first place, especially because it’s seems like you are the one doing it, after all, they are your feelings getting intensified and messed with.” Sam blanched and his breath got shallower but he soldiered on, “It’s almost like cancer, your own body doesn’t recognize its enemy”.

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn't exactly what I had in mind, like... until today the question was actually 'Why call it mind rape?' and then the plan was to explore the idea of 'consent' and only Loki was there as comparison since I had other plans for Bucky and mind control and *Sush, Author! Spoilers!*
> 
> Also, there WAS a fic that inspired a little tidbit of this one but for the life of me I can't find it... if I ever do I will make sure to give the proper credit but for now... really sorry T.T
> 
> Edit: it was a chap of dls' "If I Had This Time Again". :D


End file.
